Ontario
Rupaleem Bhuyan
Principal Investigator
Rupaleem Bhuyan is an Associate Professor at the University of Toronto, where she teaches community practice and social justice advocacy to future social workers. She was born in the United States (as the daughter of Assamese immigrants) and now is an immigrant again in Canada. Since 1991, Rupaleem has been part of the anti-violence against women movement in North America, working in collaboration with indigenous, immigrant and refugee communities. Following the events of September 11, 2001, Rupaleem became more active in immigrant rights and examining how immigration policies contribute to different forms of gender-based violence.
As the Principal Investigator for the Migrant Mothers Project, Rupaleem plans and oversees the project’s daily activities. In the spirit of feminist, participatory action research, she strives to work collaboratively with community partners, staff, and peer researchers to fulfill the MMP’s research, advocacy and community building goals.
Anna Korteweg
Co-Investigator
Anna Korteweg is Professor and Chair of Sociology at the University of Toronto Mississauga. Her work problematizes the notion of “immigrant integration” and the ways in which belonging is defined in the intersections of gender, religion, ethnicity and national origin in Western Europe and Canada. Her co-authored book (with Gökçe Yurdakul), Headscarf Debates: Conflicts of National Belonging, was published by Stanford University Press in 2014.
Lorraine Valmadrid
Lorraine is a Social Work (MSW) student at the University of Toronto. She supports the project’s work with Caregivers, which includes consulting with the Peer Research Committee, conducting individual interviews and focus groups, and performing an environmental scan of services available to Caregivers.
Kennes Lin
Kennes Lin is a Social Work (MSW) student at the University of Toronto specializing in Social Justice & Diversity. She is a 1.5 generation Chinese immigrant currently living in tkaronto, Dish with One Spoon Territory, with interest in a social justice approach to mental health and illness for racialized and Indigenous communities. She supports the project’s social media platforms and will co-develop information sheets on signs of abuse as a method of knowledge translation to domestic workers and their employers.
Kate Yoon
Kate Yoon is a research fellow at the Migrant Mothers Project, responsible for research support on a project related to migrant caregivers and sponsorship.She recently graduated from Harvard University with a degree in Social Studies and is starting her Master’s in Political Theory at the University of Oxford.Her research interests in political theory are in the ethics of migration and, in particular, the ethics of labour migration. Her work is supported by the Alex G. Booth Fellowship, Harvard University.
Cathy Schmidt
Cathy Schmidt is currently a PhD student at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Social Work. Inspired and informed by her decade of experience in social work and community development, her research is focused on the impacts of precarious immigration status on the lives of individuals and families in Canada.
Sarah Lima
Sarah Lima is an undergraduate, work-study student at the University of Toronto, working for the Migrant Mothers Project (MMP) as a Research Assistant. Her work will focus on dissemination and mobilization strategies for the project’s research, as well as creating easy-read, fully-sourced worksheets as deliverables for the project’s community and academic members.
Former Research Team Members
(In Progress)